Infrastructure as Code: Dynamic Systems for the Cloud Age

The past decade has seen cloud and infrastructure as code move out of shadow IT and startups and into the mainstream. Many organizations rushed to adopt new technologies as part of their transformation into digital businesses, creating a sprawl of unmaintainable infrastructure codebases. Now, there is a need to consolidate cloud-based systems into mature foundations for sustainable growth.

With this book, Kief Morris describes patterns and practices for building and evolving infrastructure as code. The third edition provides a broader context for infrastructure, explaining how to design and implement infrastructure to better support the strategic goals and challenges of an organization, such as supporting growth while better managing costs.

This book covers:

• Foundational concepts, including an exploration of declarative and procedural infrastructure languages, where infrastructure code fits into a comprehensive platform strategy and enterprise architecture, and how to test and deliver infrastructure code.
• Infrastructure architecture, drawing on lessons learned from software design and engineering to build infrastructure codebases that can be evolved and scaled to enable growth and adapt to changing needs.
• Patterns for building infrastructure to support platform services across the complicated, varied landscapes of real-world IT systems, from physical hardware to virtual servers to cloud-native clusters and serverless workloads.
• Workflows and operating models that combine automation and cloud with forward-thinking approaches like Agile and DevOps for rigorous governance of compliance, cost, security, and operational quality.

Kief Morris (he/him) is a distinguished engineer at ThoughtWorks. He drives conversations across roles, regions, and industries at companies ranging from global enterprises to early stage startups. He enjoys working and talking with people to explore better engineering practices, architecture design principles, and delivery practices for building systems on the cloud.

Kief ran his first online system, a bulletin board system (BBS) in Florida in the early 1990s. He later enrolled in an MSc program in computer science at the University of Tennessee because it seemed like the easiest way to get a real internet connection. Joining the CS department's system administration team gave him exposure to managing hundreds of machines running a variety of Unix flavors.

When the dot-com bubble began to inflate, Kief moved to London, drawn by the multicultural mixture of industries and people. He's still there, living with his wife, son, and cat.

Most of the companies Kief worked for before ThoughtWorks were post-startups, looking to build and scale. The titles he's been given or self-applied include Software Developer, Systems Administrator, Deputy Technical Director, R&D Manager, Hosting Manager, Technical Lead, Technical Architect, Consultant, and Director of Cloud Engineering.